Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis: The Untold Story Read Online Free PDF Page B

evidence the day he brought her home to David’s Brook in Bedford Hills. Alarmingly, Jackie became snippy when Mrs. Husted produced some family picture albums documenting a life the young woman was expected soon to become part of—indeed, to carry on in a new generation. Rudely, she refused her hostess’s offer of a childhood image of John, commenting that if she wanted a photograph of him, she was capable of taking one herself. As if tone-deaf to the implications of that dispiriting exchange, John went on to make a huge mistake: He presented Jackie with a sapphire-and-diamond engagement ring that had previously belonged to his mother. Jackie wore that ornament for several weeks thereafter, and it is tempting to imagine it blazing away on her finger as she read a new novel that, to her amazement, seemed to clarify her situation uncannily.
    The book was Sybil, and its author was thirty-four-year-old Louis Auchincloss, whose father was Hughdie’s first cousin and whose grandfather had built Hammersmith Farm. The novel’s heroine is a young New York woman who becomes a most reluctant participant in the marital sweepstakes that are of such compelling interest to others in her opulent milieu. For all of Sybil Rodman’s gestures toward escape, in the end she is drawn ineluctably into precisely the kind of hemmed-in existence she had hoped to avoid. For all of her apparent “spunk” and individuality, at last she proves deficient in the qualities of courage and determination that would make it possible to break free. This protagonist does not triumph so much as resign herself to the inevitable. The book’s icily ironic final vignette portrays poor Sybil, her capitulation to her husband’s family complete, being toasted by her exultant mother-in-law and other members of “the assembled tribe.”
    “Oh, you’ve written my life,” Jackie told beak-nosed “cousin” Louis when she encountered him at an Auchincloss family dinner in Washington not long after she had read his novel. He knew what it felt like to want to free oneself from a certain society, to create a new and different kind of life. Tracked to become a lawyer like his father, he had long aspired to be a writer. It was not that he wished altogether to remove himself from the luxe Wasp world of his New York upbringing, but rather to paint that world with ironic detachment in novels and short stories. His loving but overbearing parents had pressured him to publish previous fiction under a nom de plume for fear that his books might damage his legal career. Sybil was the first work to appear under his own name. When he and Jackie talked that evening, he was still in crisis over how he intended to live the rest of his life.
    But it was Jackie’s future they spoke of when, after a meal that had included a champagne toast on the joyous occasion of her engagement, they sat together in a corner apart from the others. Officially set to marry in June, Jackie pictured her life as the wife of such a man as she had finally chosen. Louis’s new book had helped her see it all so clearly, and like the character in the novel, she seemed grimly resigned to the inevitable. “That’s it. That’s my future,” Jackie declared. “I’ll be a Sybil Husted.”

 
    Two
    Everything had changed in the weeks since Jackie had had her interview with Frank Waldrop. As she had assured him of her commitment to the work, it was a matter of no small embarrassment now to have to disclose her wedding plans. Still, the only polite thing was to have that awkward conversation in person. So in January 1952, she visited his office for what she assumed would be the last time. After she told him her story, Waldrop, a West Point graduate who retained a certain military demeanor all his life, asked how long she had known John Husted. To Jackie’s astonishment, her answer, that she had only just met him during Christmas, seemed to settle the matter. Waldrop actually appeared relieved. “Hell,